That Bombay is now a memory. In the last twenty years, the rise of Hindu nationalism and a local variant, Maratha chauvinism, has systematically destroyed the old city. The regional party that has spearheaded this movement, the Shiv Sena, is named after a seventeenth century chieftain, Shivaji, who opposed New Delhi's (Muslim) Mughal emperors. The party is determined to rid the state of Maha- rashtra, of which Bombay is the capital, of all "alien" influences. (The Muslims came to India beginning in the twelfth century; 800 years is apparently not long enough to be considered a native.) This is most evident in its campaign to rename cities, towns, roads, and buildings that have anything other than pure Hindu names. It culminated in the renaming of Bombay as Mumbai in 1996, an act that illustrates the invented quality of much of Hindu nationalism. Unlike Beijing (a long-standing city whose name was Anglicized into Peking by Westerners), Mumbai did not really exist as a city before the Portuguese and the British called it Bombay. Like Singapore and Hong Kong, it was a tiny fishermen's village. The city was a colonial creation. "Mumbai" is not a return to the past but the validation of a myth.